User:Simon Nolan
About Me
Just your average avatar, exploring this amazing virtual world since I first rezzed on 27 March 2006. This thing still has my attention, though I can't remember now how I first discovered Second Life. Probably an article in a tech magazine or website. I'm on a constant quest for good guy hair that has a ponytail.
I run SL on an iMac Core Duo (Early 2006), Mac OS X 10.4.9. Pretty much stock except for 1.5GB RAM, DSL and other goodies. Try to not to boot the Mac into Windows unless I have to, because that's just so very wrong. Hoping to get a MacBookPro so I can get my JIRA fix while travelling for RL work. And then, after hitting the lottery, an eight-core Mac Pro with the phattest possible video card.
Projects
- Spending lots of time in the JIRA Issue tracker, mostly commenting, reproducing bugs, and hunting duplicate issues.
- Writing about SL and other stuff on my blog.
- Trying (so far with questionable results) to be a wikimonkey.
- Wondering why this article from Wired is so true.
Source Contributions
My teensy, trivial patch for VWR-409 has been credited in a couple of places by LL. I'm honored and humbled to be included in a list with people like Nicholaz Beresford, Alissa Sabre, Gigs Taggart, Hiro Somnambulist, to mention a few. I gotta get on the ball and do something more signficant.
LSL and Web Integration
Currently developing a RubyOnRails-powered, web-based events calendar, using LSL to communicate with the web server in-world, as part of a project for the Gay Life group. Project is dead.
Viewer UI
I'm learning about XUI and other parts of viewer architecture.
Replacement UI Icons
Working on replacing the oh-so-1995 stock UI icons (and wondering about the "right" way to do it), and trying to figure out how to skin the viewer. Read about what I've done so far on my blog in the article Modding the Second Live viewer: UI icons.
Branded Application Icons for Mac OS X
Voice Beta branded icon
WindLight branded icon
If you're like me, you keep the current general release viewer, a beta, and a First Look viewer all installed on your computer. Since it gets confusing having three identical Second Life icons in the Dock, I like to "brand" the beta and First Look so I can get to them easily.
Just paste the PNG files below onto your SL application icons to make them easy to differentiate. You'll need to delete SL from the Dock and re-add it after doing this to get the Dock icon to update quickly. Here are the exact steps to get your SL applications branded:
- If the SL viewer is running, quit the viewer.
- Download the images above by right-clicking and choosing "Save Image..." or whatever your browser prompts in the contextual menu.
- Open the image in Preview
- Type CMD-C to copy the entire image.
- Find your SL viewer in the Applications folder or where ever you put it, and type CMD-I to Get Info.
- Click on the application icon in the Get Info window.
- Type CMD-V to paste on the new Icon.
- If you have the SL viewer in your dock, drag the viewer icon out of the Dock to delete the icon. Drag the newly branded icon to the Dock.
- Enjoy your new icons.
(Before you copy three different SL versions to your application folder, remember they have to have different names or they'll overwrite. LL doesn't always give the beta or First Look viewer a unique name. When installing the viewer, copy it to your desktop from the disk image, rename it, then move it to your Applications folder.)
Decoupling the UI from the SL viewer window
Would like to contribute to decoupling the user interface so that UI menus can move up to the Mac menu bar and allow windows to be moved out of the SL window and onto a second monitor. (This is the holy grail, IMO, for Mac users.) Of course, it would have to be done in a portable, cross-platform way with minimal Mac-specific code. Yeah, I know, "good luck with that."